This invention relates to a radar system for use with aircraft, seagoing vessels, ground stations or the like, capable of both automatic horizontal and vertical scanning and display of both horizontal sweep return signals and vertical sweep return signals.
Currently used airborne weather radar systems display radar returns in a plan view only representing weather images as the radar beam sweeps horizontally back and forth ahead of the aircraft. This plan view image does provide an indication of the intensity of a weather condition, such as a storm containing water droplets, in various colors, with the color hue representing the degree of reflectivity. The distance from the object or condition from which a radar echo arose is depicted on the radar display by the relative position on the display from the display location representing the aircraft. That is, a point on the display represents the aircraft, i.e., the radar antenna, and then fanning out from that location horizontally the weather image is developed. All this is well known in the airborne weather radar art.
Weather radar systems do have provision for manually tilting the radar antenna up or down so that radar returns may be taken along sweeps at different elevations. By knowing the angle of elevation of the radar beam, the altitude of the aircraft, and the distance of certain echo returns, a trigonometric calculation or estimate can be made as to the height or heights of weather conditions from which the echoes were reflected. However, when flying in a stormy weather condition, the flight crew is typically preoccupied with other matters such as navigating the aircraft and therefore typically would not have the time to successively manually tilt the radar antenna, make trigonometric calculations, and then determine the height of the various portions of the storm. This is especially true if a stormy weather condition is combined with the need for an instrument approach to an airport.
From the above considerations, it is apparent that some type of automatic vertical presentation of a weather condition, along with the horizontal presentation, would be desirable. Then, the flight crew could view and hopefully interpret such presentations at a glance to make determinations as to the need or desirability of navigating the aircraft to avoid certain areas or taking other navigation precautions.
Automatic vertical and horizontal presentation of weather conditions would also be useful for ground stations, ships and other radar-based environments.